by -
Scientists built the largest digital camera ever, weighing 3 tons with a 5-foot lens, for astronomy.
-
The LSST camera is designed to take thousands of 3,200-megapixel images of the entire southern sky.
-
A telescope in Chile will use it to study dark energy, dark matter, and potentially hazardous asteroids.
The world’s largest digital camera has finally been completed in a lab in Menlo Park, California.
The Legacy SUV Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera weighs about 6,200 pounds – about 3 metric tons – and its front lens is more than five feet wide.
The LSST camera must be so large to achieve its mission, to carry out a 10-year digital survey of the entire southern sky, scanning the entire area every few nights, creating the largest astronomical film ever.
“No one has ever looked at so much of the universe so often,” Aaron Roodman, deputy director of the Rubin Observatory and head of the camera program, told Business Insider.
LSST isn’t just a fun project to break records, though. Among its cutting-edge science goals, the camera can also track large asteroids the size of cities so NASA can identify any space rocks that could threaten Earth.
The camera’s power will also help investigate the mysterious dark energy and dark matter that fills our universe and puzzles scientists.
Scientists and engineers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory built this leviathan lens over two decades and up to $168 million.
Finally, it is finished, ready to be shipped to the Rubin Observatory in Chile, high in the Andes mountains. Engineers plan to put it on the observatory later this year.
A full-sky panorama, but 10 years long
Photos from the LSST camera will have 3,200 megapixels.
One megabyte equals one million pixels. An ultra-high definition, or 4K, TV can only display about 8 megapixels. To display an image from the LSST camera in full resolution, you would need hundreds of ultra HD TVs.
“His images are so detailed that he could resolve a golf ball from about 15 miles away while covering a swath of sky seven times wider than the full moon,” Roodman said in a press release.
LSST is designed to take around 1,000 images each night, stitching them together to form one highly detailed image of the entire southern sky every few nights. More than 10 years, and thousands of images, should be what researchers are calling the 3D film of the universe.
“This method allows us to observe changes in more than 20 billion galaxies, tracking their movements and how they change,” said Travis Lange, deputy project manager of the SLAC LSST team, in a video on the project this month spent
Due to its dedication, LSST should be able to capture all kinds of cosmic events in real time.
Catching the red-handed globe
Highly sensitive space observatories such as the James Webb Space Telescope have scheduled time to focus on specific objects and are not always able at the last minute to target emerging supernovae or interstellar visitors. stars that pass through our solar system.
LSST will not have to pivot at all. If something is happening in the southern sky, this giant camera should see it as it surveys the entire area.
That will enable the new camera to discover asteroids in our neighborhood that may be flying undetected until now.
“We will be able to see things smaller than other telescopes have seen,” Roodman told BI. “And since we’re surveying so quickly, we’re really looking forward to a lot of what’s in there.”
The LSST is also designed to send alerts to astronomers whenever it detects something new or changing in the sky. This allows astronomers to turn their telescopes to observe new supernovae, black hole mergers, and other astronomical phenomena in all wavelengths of light, gathering more data than ever before about these dynamic events.
The survey is likely to reveal new types of objects and events in deep space, Roodman said.
Hunt for dark clues
LSST’s ability to track changes in galaxies over a decade will also give scientists new insight into how the universe has changed over time. That’s key to understanding dark energy and dark matter.
Dark energy is the name scientists have given to the mysterious force that is causing the universe to expand faster and faster. Dark matter is some type of matter that takes up space and has mass but does not seem to interact with light.
Together, dark energy and matter make up the vast majority of the universe, and no one knows what they are. LSST could help find clues.
“If you look at one galaxy, you can’t tell anything. But if you look at hundreds of millions or billions—and we’ll look at billions of galaxies—you can see patterns all over the sky,” Roodman said. “You can see the trace of how matter is distributed around the globe.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
